All posts tagged make the verb work

A common writing mistake is to keep a key part of the sentence to the end. This makes it hard to see what is going on; often one must read the sentence twice to understand it. Here’s an example from today’s Guardian, discussing Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

Internationally he has made the Canada that begged to differ (with Britain on Suez, on Vietnam with America, for example) and the Canada that was a pillar of peacekeeping and the United Nations a distant memory.

The sentence is hard to grasp first time because “made” and “a distant memory” are so far apart. Only by the end of the sentence is its meaning clear. A simple change improves clarity:

Internationally he has made a distant memory of the Canada that begged to differ (with Britain on Suez, with America on Vietnam) and the Canada that was a pillar of peacekeeping and the United Nations.